Jon’s away at camp again this year, and like the past two years we’ve taken off for a short holiday of our own. This time we stayed a bit closer to home (no leaping across the pond like last year) and enjoyed a few days — a very few days — in the Big Apple itself, New York City.
Day 1
We flew down on Porter Airlines, a first for both of us. It’s a very civilized way to fly: The Island Airport is small and cozy, and close by us (no $50 taxi ride to Pearson necessary). The Porter lounge has free snacks, pairs of chairs with nearby reading lamps rather than impersonal banks of seats, and iMacs for anyone to use! Porter even feeds you more during a one-hour flight than WestJet does for a transcontinental flight. The flight attendants’ uniforms are 60s retro, complete with cute pillbox hats.
From Newark Airport in New Jersey we took a 25-minute commuter train right into Pennsylvania Station, near Madison Square Garden. Our hotel? Basic, clean, as reasonable as anything you’re going to get in Manhattan (which really isn’t saying much — ouch!), and a 2-minute walk from Penn Station. A fellow Newark train traveller helped us with the NJ Transit ticket machine. Upon chatting at Penn, it turned out that she is a Canadian working in the Education department at the Museum of Modern Art, and she gave us a free family pass to the museum!
But I already bought the flowers and decorations!
Since we had only a few hours to kill before our first show, we walked south toward Chelsea Market at 15th St. It’s a chi-chi sort of place, filled with very boutiquey shops (with an incredible number of bakeries).
We had to head back north to 27th St., so we walked along one of the newest and most original uses of public space I’ve ever seen: The High Line — a greenspace park that uses an old and disused elevated freight train railway running along the west side of the city.
Lots of plants alongside the concrete paver path, which runs alongside and through the old tracks.
A wonderful assortment of benches ranging from ampitheatre-like tiers (the “stage” area wittily framed with a pane of glass so you can watch the traffic below):
to wooden chaise-longue-like structures, perfect for lounging on:
It’s a brilliant concept, and the design of the park shows real civic imagination that’s all too sorely lacking in our own city.
After descending from the High Line we went to the first of three planned shows, Sleep No More. Originally staged by the imaginative UK troupe Punchdrunk, this show is probably most accurately described as “immersive theatre”. Sleep No More is set in three adjacent warehouses which have been completely made over to resemble an old, Art Deco hotel, complete with worn furnishings and creepy staff. The audience are made to wear venetian-type half-masks to maintain anonymity, and are instructed to never speak.
However, you are encouraged to wander freely throughout the dimly-lit rooms — over 100 rooms over six floors (the installation is huge!) — inspecting anything you wish: open doors, rifle through desk drawers, read the love letters within. The dancer-actors (who mainly gesture and mime; there’s virtually no dialog in the work) enact scenes which may or may not make sense at the time, and audience members can choose whether or not to follow them from room to room. I tried doing this, but it was difficult as the actors moved fast, the rooms were kept very dim and the audience tended to get bottlenecked in the stairwells. The “plot” (such as it is) and characters are a mash-up of Macbeth and film noir, with characters dressed (and sometimes completely undressed) in 1930s clothes. Audience members are not allowed to touch actors, but actors are allowed to grab audience members. No two audience members get the same show, and on comparing notes afterwards, Peter and I found that we saw completely different scenes. The audience, by subtle prodding by the staff “porters”, as well as sheer herd mentality, finally find themselves gathered in the ballroom for the final scene, so the show does have a conclusion. I’m not exactly sure I made sense of it (I had absolutely no clue what was happening to whom much of the time, since I’m not familiar with Macbeth), but it was absolutely creepy and riveting.
Day 2
We did some book shopping before lunch. (The Strand likes to boast that it’s “18 Miles of New, Used and Rare Books!” and I have no reason to doubt them.) Their signs are a hoot:
Peter had met friends Mike and Heidi through Twitter and, delightfully, we were able to meet up for lunch at a local diner. We had a great time and a long lunch.
Unfortunately, we were a little later in getting tickets to our second show than we intended to be. We got to The Daily Show studio around 3 pm. Because TDS tapings are free, to score a seat you go through a convoluted procedure:
1. Luck out in getting your name in online when tickets for a given date become available;
2. Show up EARLY on the day of the show to get a number (the reservation only gives you the right to get a number, but numbers are handed out on a first-come, first-served basis);
3. At 4:45 pm line up in numerical order and (hopefully) get in.
Unfortunately, people who were bumped from previous tapings get VIP tickets that get them seated before any of the numbered ticket holders. That meant our numbers of 165 and 166 were iffy, since the studio only seats about 200 people.
One of the dreaded blue tickets (The first 100 or so people get yellow tickets and are pretty much guaranteed to get in.)
Security was pretty tight, with thorough bag searches and metal detectors, so it took a long time to get in. You killed time standing around, sniffing the manure-scented air. (The studio is right around the corner from the stables for the New York carriage-ride horses.) By the time we made it to the door they announced that there was only one seat left, which was heartbreaking. The family of four ahead of us refused to get split up. Peter shoved me forward, yelling “one here!” and I was in.
I have to admit that it took me quite a while to get over my upset of Peter not getting in as well, so I didn’t enjoy the show as much as I could have. Jon Stewart did a short Q and A with the audience (my favourite question was “What’s your take on the First Amendment issue regarding truck scrotums?”); after that the taping was almost identical in length to the finished show, with only one minor line re-take. Because of the miking, it was harder to hear Stewart than on TV, so I missed quite a few jokes. (The warm-up guy told us that the audience is miked at half-volume, so we were exhorted to bust our guts laughing.)
We passed by the nearby Colbert Report studio, but never actually took a picture of TDS’s building.
Reuniting with Peter after the show, we walked from 52nd St. back to our 27th St. hotel, passing through the Bedlam that is Times Square. It is a truly amazing and fearsome sight, pretty much encapsulating everything the US represents. Pictures don’t really do it justice; it was almost vertigo-inducing, as well as a good approximation of how a person with a dissociative disorder might view the world.
And the sheer awful awesomeness of the three-story M & M World store is stunning. Literally: I felt like I was hit over the head with a candy-coloured sledgehammer.
Day 3
Day 3 was museum day. The Metropolitan Museum is so staggeringly huge that we decided not to go there, figuring that we’d need at least a solid couple of days to even make a creditable stab at it. Instead we crossed Central Park from the subway to the petite Frick Collection, a small museum containing tycoon Henry Frick’s personal collection of many works from the 15th to 19th centuries, including one of our all-time favourites, Holbein’s incredible portrait of Thomas More.
After Frick we used our free pass to the MoMA (saving us $40!) and went to the painting exhibits on the top floor. These mainly consisted of the older modern masters, including iconic works such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Monet’s Water Lilies, Dalí’s Persistence of Memory (which is a LOT smaller than I thought it would be), and much Picasso. Great stuff!
Water Lilies is huge!
After dinner we went to the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center to see War Horse, a play originally staged by the Royal Shakespeare Comapny, based on Michael Morpurgo’s children’s book about cavalry horses in World War I.
The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center; the Beaumont is part of the unobtrusive building behind the trees at the right of the Met.
The play itself is a pretty standard boy-loves-horse drama, but oh, the horses! Huge metal wireframe puppets, the horses are not ultra-realistic, but by the time the three puppeteers per horse work their magic, you’d swear these were real horses. The show’s staging was very effective as well, with projections on a simple screen backdrop suggesting the horrors of war or the passage of time. The accents occasionally wobbled a bit (some of the young American actors need more coaching in British English), but the cast worked very well together.
When we came out of the show the drizzly rain had turned into a torrential downpour (with my umbrella in the hotel room!) We sloshed several blocks to a C line subway station, realizing only when we got there that we could’ve grabbed the #1 line right at Lincoln Center and stayed nice and dry. C’est la vie. The subways are spaghetti-like, efficient and clear of graffiti and garbage (unlike when I visited the city as a teenager). Cheaper than the TTC, too.
Food
New York, of course, is a mecca for foodies, and pretty much every restaurant we ate at had scrumptious food. Before Sleep No More we ate dinner at The Green Table, a lovely restaurant in Chelsea Market featuring sustainable organic/local fare. Pot pies, pasta, lots of fruits and veggies – very fresh, straightforward and delish.
After the Stewart taping we went a block away to a fabulous dinner at Taboon, a middle-eastern/Mediterranean restaurant. Creative, original flavourings, and interesting desserts (mine was vanilla ice-cream with honeyed pistachios and caramel and a sprinkling of crushed halva. Yum.)
Our last dinner was at Whym, another Hell’s Kitchen-area restaurant. It bills itself as having a “modern American” menu, and had quite a melange of dishes of updated comfort food, Tex-Mex with a twist and other influences. My meal of grilled shrimp sitting on a bosc pear and brie quesadilla was supremely tasty. Peter was thrilled with his Warm Chocolate Cake – he found it pretty much matched his ideal of a lava cake!
A Twitter pal suggested we try the People’s Pops at Chelsea Market. These are ice pops made from intruiging combinations of local, sustainably-grown fruit and flavourings. Peter had a yellow plum and tarragon pop and I had a rhubarb and jasmine-flavoured one. If the People’s Pops location on the High Line had been open when we walked on it on our last day we would’ve had more!
I made sure we visited some of NYC’s better espresso shops to see how they compared with our local ones. (Conclusion: the best Toronto cafés can compete with the best New York espresso joints.) We visited two locations of Joe The Art of Coffee, (13th St. & 23rd St.), where we had excellent coffee drinks and a lovely, long chat with one of the baristas, Charrow, who is also an illustrator. We also went to Café Grumpy on 20th St. I had a very good macchiato; Peter’s mocha not quite as satisfactory. But I couldn’t resist buying one of their cups:
And then, too soon we were heading back home.
Niagara Falls from our plane.
About a minute from landing at Toronto Island Airport.
Our visit was really too short to do the city justice – we stuck a lot around the Chelsea/Hell’s Kitchen areas as well as midtown around Museum Mile. We would’ve liked to visit neighbourhoods nearer the southern tip of the island, as well as the east side. But unlike our visits to Québec and Europe, New York was recognizably akin to Toronto — the same busy, “city for working” feeling that T.O. has, albeit on a much larger and more flamboyant scale.
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David Barker says:
August 7, 2011 at 12:42 am (UTC 0)
Wonderful! Envious as all hell!
Laura says:
August 7, 2011 at 7:57 pm (UTC 0)
One NYC food item that I would definitely not recommend are their street hot dogs. Unlike the nice grilled ones we get here, they’re BOILED! Eeeee-yuk!